The month of November is National Blog Posting Month. This is my 5th year participating. This year, for thirty days, I'll be telling stories from some point in my life. Enjoy!
In the summer of 2001 my sister and I decided to drive to New Jersey to go to a Barenaked Ladies concert. The trip planning became central focus to my sister and I sort of took the back seat happy to be along for the ride. My primary contributions to the trip were suggesting that we visit some of the wacky and weird sites discussed in a book I'd just read called, "Driving Mr. Albert" about the guy who drove Albert Einstein's brain from Princeton, NJ to UCLA in California.
Anyway - the trip was one of those once-in-a-lifetime-do-something-really-awesome-with-your-sister kind of trips and as part of the journey we decided to spend a couple of days in The Big Apple, New York City. We rode the train in from Red Bank, NJ and had a great time.
On our last night in NYC, we were walking through Times Square headed to the train station when we noticed a guy following us. He was of slight build, middle eastern decent and I towered over him. After a few blocks of feeling him get closer and closer he finally was at the same crosswalk waiting with us and started a conversation.
His name was Jene and he was from Pakistan, educated in London, living with cousins in NYC looking for work. I seem to remember that he had a slight English accent. That may be the only reason I decided it was okay to talk to him.
He wanted to know where we were from. He said he'd never seen such tall, blond white girls before. I suppose we did stand out a bit as not being from the East, and my hair was a bit of a glow-in-the-dark blond at the time, but we weren't anything special.
We told him we were from Utah. He wanted to know if we were Mormons. When we told him yes, he wanted to know if we were married to the same man. Oh, the ghosts of polygamy still haunt us. He also wanted our contact information because he was trying to get a job and was willing to go anywhere in the US to get one.
This long and involved conversation took us the blocks to the train station and he followed us in. I wasn't sure if we were ever going to get rid of him, or how to escape. We new our train was coming but he didn't seem to have any reason to not get on the train with us. I finally gave in and gave him my e-mail address and that seemed to appease him enough to let my sister and I go in peace.
A few weeks after we got home, I got an e-mail from him. Actually several e-mails. He wanted to come out west. He wanted to get a job. He wanted to know if he could live with me and my family. He wanted to know (yes, family, I never told any of you this), if I had a boyfriend because he thought I was beautiful and American.
Green card?
Somehow I managed to get rid of him. I think I might have lied and told him I was engaged. We were in NYC in July, this all happened in August, and we all know what happened in September of 2001. I'm sure that if Jene was still in New York at that time, he was a target for all kinds of crap and spending his time e-mailing some Tall Mormon girl from Utah just wasn't worth the time.
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